In this episode, I talk to Helen Morgan Parmett. She works as Associate Professor at The University of Vermont in the United States. Drawing on her long-time work and book “Stadium City” published this Fall 2025, we look into the interplay between media, sport, and place. In the podcast, Helen addresses the mediatization of sport giving concrete examples of how that plays out in the U.S. We also talk about the imagined stadium-goer and how that has changed over the years, as well as the connections that can be drawn to the notion of white space.
Helen’s recommended resources:
· Bale, J. (1994). Landscapes of modern sport. LeicesterUniversity Press.
· Lipsitz, G. (2011). How racism takes place. Temple UniversityPress.
· Delaney, K. J., & Eckstein, R. (2007). Public dollars, private stadiums: The battle over building sports stadiums. Rutgers University Press; /z-wcorg/.
· Frank, S., & Steets, S. (Eds.). (2010). Stadium worlds: Football, space and the built environment. Routledge.
· Jirásek, I., & Kohe, G. Z. (2015). Readjusting Our Sporting Sites/Sight: Sportification and the Theatricality of Social Life. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 9(3), 257–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/17511321.2015.1065433
· Johnson, V. E. (2021). Sports TV. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
· Parks, L., & Starosielski, N. (Eds.). (2015). Signal traffic: Critical studies of media infrastructures. University of Illinois Press.
· Rowe, D. (2008). Sport, culture and the media: The unruly trinity (2. ed., repr). Open University Press.
· Tuan, Y.-F. (1979). Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective. In S. Gale & G. Olsson (Eds.), Philosophy in Geography. Springer Netherlands.
· Wenner, L. A. (2010). MediaSport. Routledge.
· Yang, C., & Cole, C. L. (2020). Smart Stadium as a Laboratory of Innovation: Technology, Sport, and Datafied Normalization of the Fans. Communication & Sport, 216747952094357. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479520943579
Helen’s highlighted work:
· Parmett, H. M. (2025). Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States. University of Illinois Press.
· Morgan Parmett, H. (2019). Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag(Media Geography at Mainz series).
· Morgan Parmett, H. (2022). The Sportification of Place: Governance, Mediatization, and Place-Branding throughthe Stadium. In Brendan Kredell, Erica Stein, and Germaine Halegoua (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media & the City. Routledge.
· Morgan Parmett, H. (2021). “Keep it off the Field”: The Mediatized Sports Stadium as White Space. In Sarah D. Nilsen & Sarah E. Turner (Eds.), White Supremacy and the American Media. Routledge.
· Morgan Parmett, H. & Rodgers, S. (2018). Space, Place andCirculation: Three Conceptual Lenses into the Spatialities of Media Production Practices. In Mekonnen Tesfahuney & KarinFast (Eds.), Geomedia. New York: Routledge.
Thank you to Elmeri Tommiska for the music and to Jyri Väisänen for the post-production assistance.
